Category: Uncategorized

Microsoft capitulation

Tech culture is very fond of persistence, stubbornness, perseverance, and the idea that you should never give up. We’re surrounded by stories of visionaries who were told they’d never succeed and went on to change the world. But sometimes, you should put selection bias aside and, yes, give up.

This applies to big companies perhaps even more than for startups. Big companies have entire strategy teams devoted to working out what to do next and how to do it, and budgets to hire strategy consulting firms for millions of $ to produce 100-page decks with more strategies and ways to achieve them. Such people have little interest in saying ‘give up – it won’t work’ (perhaps because that might mean you don’t need a strategy team anymore). And there’s no SmartArt for failure.

Microsoft today, I think, is a case study in knowing when you should indeed give up, and what you should do after that.

Amnesty in Brooklyn

“I don’t know what happened,” James said of the initial summons. She kept one pink earbud in as we talked outside the church. She had just successfully cleared her warrant. In March, she recounted, she was sitting on a bench with her cousin in Fulton Park when a police officer approached. “She gave us both tickets for public drinking, but I wasn’t even holding anything”. She stretched the length of the earbud wire across her stomach. She thought her pregnancy must have been visible to the officer that night. James was unable to travel to the summons court, in lower Manhattan, the day she had been assigned to answer the citation. As generally happens with unanswered summonses, a warrant was put out for her arrest.

Oversized Bronze Age axes

Radiocarbon dating found the axes were made between 3.8 and 3.5 ka BP, a period bridging the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age. This places them among the earliest bronze artifacts ever discovered in Denmark. Bronze axes from this era are so rare only 5 of them have been found before in Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany. That means the Boest find has in one fell swoop doubled the number of these Bronze Age axes in the archaeological record of northern Europe. When you consider that
Bent Rasmussen and his brother, enlisted by Bent during excavations to cover more ground with their metal detectors, found another 4 smaller axes and a spear tip, it’s clear that this field in Boest was an important place during the early Bronze Age.

Hacking Team

an overview of the nest of vipers doing 0day business with hacking team. all these companies are good targets for being taken down.

The recent compromise of Hacking Team’s email archive offers 1 of the first public case studies of the market for 0days. Because of its secretive nature, this market has been the source of endless debates on the ethics of its participants. The archive also offers insight into the capabilities and limits of offensive-intrusion software developers.

Russia Mapped the World

While Davies and Kent found information that could only have come from spies on the ground—a bridge in Miami, for example, has information that only an eyewitness could have provided—there were fewer of these instances than shows like The Americans might suggest. “There were probably not a lot of people going around with notebooks. There was, after all, plenty in the public domain—maps, but also street directories, tourist guides, railway timetables, and the like.”

The Amiga turns 30

Nice series.

the Amiga 1000 was the first true PC for creatives. The Amiga 1000 was “a radical multimedia machine from a group of thinkers, tinkerers, and visionaries which delivered affordable graphics, animation, music, and multitasking interaction the personal computer world hadn’t even dreamt of.” It pioneered desktop video and introduced PCs to countless new users, rocketing Amiga and Commodore to the top for a brief moment in the sun. History of the Amiga attempts to explain what the device was, what it meant to its designers and users, and why, despite its relative obscurity and early demise, it continues to matter so much to the computer industry and its enthusiasts.